Fleisher/Ollman is pleased to announce Department of Neighborhood Services, a three-person exhibition with Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Dan Murphy (both live and work in Philadelphia), and Barry McGee (lives and works in San Francisco). The artists have been familiar with one another's work for over a decade, having shown or collaborated together in a number of contexts including exhibitions, publications, and in the public realm. All have an interest in graffiti through direct involvement in marking outdoor surfaces, documenting it photographically, respecting its history and traditions, and incorporating graffiti's energy and sensibility into their work.

Using paint and ink, Isaac Tin Wei Lin (b. 1976) overlays calligraphic forms on a variety of materials, including enlarged family photographs, vinyl tarps, rain ponchos, shirts, walls, panels, and found paper. Characters from cats to ghosts, rendered in a comic style, appear both in delicate gouaches and larger-than-life cut-outs, often covered in pattern themselves. Lin's brushwork--a kind of graffiti of the imagination where form trumps identifiable lettering--springs like benevolent viruses or kudzu vines covering anything within reach. Lin often installs his art on similarly painted walls, creating overwhelming, buzzing environments where no surface is safe from visual cacophony.

Dan Murphy (b. 1975) has been a keen observer of the urban environment through many years of graffiti writing, and as a partner (with Anthony Smyrski) in the creative platform Megawords. For Department of Neighborhood Services, Murphy erodes and alters his photographs of blighted neighborhoods, jerry-rigged architecture, and graffiti vandals in action, by photocopying images and mounting them to plexiglass--an interesting frisson of the decrepit and the slick. Murphy's experience as a professional sign painter (working at Steve Powers' ICY Signs) also shines through in a group of color vinyl abstractions adhered to opaque plastic, conjuring the low-budget advertising of bygone eras.

Barry McGee (b. 1966) has inhabited the two distinct worlds of graffiti and gallery-based art for over two decades, advocating a kind of graffiti that even the art world does not like: tags inscribed illicitly on urban surfaces. While he demands a return to hardcore graffiti vandalism kept safely in the streets where it belongs, in his gallery art McGee chooses to focus less on this non-aestheticized type of graffiti than on the context of its production, by considering how it exists in the urban environment. McGee will present a large-scale, multiple-panel painting featuring Op art abstraction, geometric shapes, and words rendered in a variety of letterforms; a signature wall cluster including photographs of urban desolation, graffiti documentation, and the artist's delicate drawings of faces and figures; and, finally, a sampling of found-object sculpture transformed into polychromed vessels.

RIME, a.k.a. Jersey Joe, is a U.S. based graffiti artist. Known for continually pushing the limits of lettering, RIME's pieces are a combination of vivid colors, cartoon-style outlines and bold tags.
For his first solo-show in France at the Galerie Wallworks, RIME will show a recent series of paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, and customized urban equipment.

In Paris a week before the show, RIME will recreate a New York street in the gallery, painting on-site a few pieces such as: phone booths, fire-hydrants, mailboxes, subway signs, and an iconic four-way traffic light.

RIME a.k.a. Jersey Joe
Born in 1979 in Brooklyn, NYC, RIME learns graffiti in 1991 in Staten Island, NYC, before ventu- ring into other parts of New York, including Soho in Manhattan. He spent several years evolving his technique and style in the streets of New York and, in 1995, in the neighborhoods of New Jersey. In 2003 he made his first trip outside the United States and traveled in Europe for two months. He earned international recognition under the pseudonyms of RIME and Jersey Joe. On his return, he began to exhibit in galleries. In 2005, he left the East Coast and moved to Los Angeles. He then joined the crew MSK - Mad Society Kings - composed of artists like Reyes, Revok, Saber, Pose... and later joined another artists’ collective called The Seventh Letter. RIME also founded several collaborative projects such as The Exchange, a graffiti education program for public schools pupils in Los Angeles, or Revamp the '90s, which aims to revive old works. Aside from his graffiti art and fine art projects, RIME has also collaborated on a variety of branding campaigns, advertisements, apparel designs, and films.

Reaction Lines

« Starting with an empty space to paint, each stroke is thrown down unapologetically; influencing what follows. Beginning with aggressive abstracted compositions that most often create the structure for an an energetic open-ended story. Technically, the work created here is done in an effort to exercise gut instincts in the painting process, allowing fate and circumstance in as an excuse to try odd shit without being shook (afraid). Trusting in your mind and body’s natural ability to problem solve without the use of modern technological crutches. »
– RIME, January 2014.

« Social relationships and experiences are most often the main source of inspiration in the crea- tion of my work. Rather than going to a museum or a gallery to pull ideas, I’m drawn more towards strange, dysfunctional, or exciting personal involvement to fuel my art. For the past few years I’ve made a conscious effort to travel away from routine, venture through odd sce- narios and use my art as a way to illustrate what’s going on. I figure the more personal I can get with my work, the more I’ll have to emotionally invest into each piece, making the finished piece true (even if exaggerated). » – RIME, January 2014.

April 09, 2014

Originals, Copies, and Fades is a continuation of the artist's series, Fade Diary, in which Choit photographs fading advertising images repeated within an urban context. Her photographic work as a whole centres on an exploration of fading—a process by which all images are eventually destroyed by the very light that makes them visible. For Originals, Copies, and Fades, Choit continues to explore forgotten locations, documenting mass-produced images within storefront windows—primarily those that are vestiges of older forms of commerce—as they become bleached by the sun's ultraviolet rays. With this new body of work she focusses her camera on the glass that separates the artist from her subject, revealing the its surface by capturing dirt, condensation, and glare. Glass plays a crucial part in her concept as it not only magnifies the fading effects of the sun's UV rays, accelerating the ultimate destruction of the images she records, but it is a necessary part of modern photographic processes. While using a camera to capture a scene, the photographer is inevitably separated from the subject by a piece of glass - the lens. This condition replicates itself while viewing framed works in a gallery, where the viewer is also separated from the image/object by a plane of glass. This new work reveals an invisible substance inherent to a number of commonplace aesthetic experiences.Cooper Cole1161 Dundas Street WestToronto, ON M6J 1X3Canada

If the canvas sites an alphabet, the gallery is the cahier.
Vanessa Maltese presents The Compleat Gamester - a lexicon for ramblers.

-text by Laurie Kang

Vanessa Maltese (b. 1988, Toronto, Canada) holds a BFA from OCAD University. She is the National Winner of the 2012 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and has exhibited her work nationally. Most recently Maltese was included in the group show One, and Two, and More Than Two curated by Micah Lexier at The Power Plant, Toronto. This marks her first solo exhibition with Cooper Cole. Maltese currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

April 08, 2014

Official opening: April 10 2014, 7PM
The exhibition will run until May 8th, 2014.

Especially for this show REM produces a limited edition Andrea Wan T-shirt with one of her designs which will be launched at the exhibition opening. Make sure to get one of the 100pcs at the Art Space.

Andrea Wan is born in Hong Kong and grew up in Vancouver, BC. Andrea Wan is a Visual Artist and Illustrator with a passion in storytelling. She mostly works with ink on paper and sees her work as a visual journal that reflects her thoughts and experiences. Her drawings combine traditional narrative aesthetics with eerie and surrealist qualities, depicting a world with great sensibility. She finds inspiration by looking outwards to observe her surroundings such as people and places, and looking introspectively into the obscure corners of her subconscious. She believes that our internal and external worlds simultaneously influences and reflects one another, communicating using clues and metaphors, our subconscious dropping hints into our waking life, causing moments of synchronicity. Her new series, Mirror Mirror, explores the dialog between these two coexisting realms with curiosity.

April 06, 2014

NANO 4814Nuevas Buenas NuevasApril, 10 - July, 15­, 2014Opening: Thursday 10th April, 9pm
Before we have even seen his works, Nano is telling us what we’re in for. An intentional surfeit of meaning. A rejection of singular interpretation. A purposefully ambiguous, purposefully playful relationship to words (as much as images). Good News. New Goods. An equivalently religious and secular turn of phrase. Terms related to the sacred and the commercial in equal measure. And a connection which Nano has meant to be as obvious as it is abstract, a linkage whose tenuousness, whose inherent strangeness he embraces.

Just as with the title, as with the artefacts housed within. The shapes and forms that Nano presents here are both linked and detached, they work in concert but we don’t know how, or even why. Balloons squashed together in seemingly impossible formations, their flexibility and vulnerability pushed to the very edge. Disembodied figures intertwined with Nano’s famous patterns and colours, figures residing within curious, ethereal spaces. Installations and sculptures which defy all logic yet which remain somehow strangely familiar, strangely remembered.

And just like the title once again, what all Nano’s work also exhibit is the warped humour, the non-sense that he so loves. What they all follow is LeWitt’s entreaty to “Stop it and just DO!”, to “Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy”... That is what Nuevas Buenas Nuevas brings us, a reminder that meaning of a piece is only one part of the whole, that the feeling they provoke is meaning’s equal. A simultaneous feeling of the uncanny and of beauty. Of delight and disquiet all at once. Nano’s tricksteresque condition emerging once again.

April 05, 2014

Ever Gold Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new painting, sculpture and video from New York based artist Henry Gunderson. The exhibition will be on view from April 5th – May 3rd.

Create in your mind an image of yourself enjoying something you want. Something you want to experience in your life right now. See it, feel yourself, having what you want, in its most perfect and complete state. You are in a place of deep magic. Enjoy this experience.

Henry Gunderson (b. 1990) is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Originally from the Bay Area, Gunderson received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Gunderson has had solo exhibitions at Ever Gold Gallery and FFDG gallery in San Francisco and has participated in group shows at Cooper Cole (Toronto), The Luggage Store (SF), Breeze Block Gallery (Portland) and Gallery one Three (Melbourne). Gunderson also runs the net-based art gallery, The Water McBeer Gallery and has been part of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 89plus Colony since 2013.